Catholic church trying to slither its way into secular Canadian politics

[Grimmlok]

Oct. 17, 2006. 05:38 AM
STUART LAIDLAW
FAITH AND ETHICS REPORTER


CORNWALL, ONT.—Spurred by papal scoldings and a Conservative government promising to reopen the same-sex marriage debate, Canada's Catholic church is positioning itself to take a much more active role in the country's politics.

"We are a big part of this society," Winnipeg Archbishop James Weisgerber, vice-president of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, told the Star yesterday. "We will be a vigorous part of the debate."

Much of the conference's week-long annual meeting here is dedicated to strategizing for taking a larger role in public policy debates.

"As leaders, we are guardians of long traditions of wisdom," Weisgerber said.

In their pilgrimages to Rome over the past several months, Canada's bishops were repeatedly admonished by Pope Benedict XVI for allowing those traditions to slip in Canada in the face of growing secularism.

"The church has the right and the responsibility to comment on these issues," Bishop Luigi Ventura, the Pope's apostolic nuncio (ambassador) to Canada, told yesterday's meeting.

Weisgerber, who returned Saturday from his papal meeting, agreed with the pope's concerns about Canada, saying the morals religion once gave society have not been replaced with another set of values as church membership has waned.

"People don't really have a sense of personal sin or reflection," he said. "We are becoming a more selfish and hedonistic society."

Such concerns have become increasingly crystallized around the debate over same-sex marriage, legalized by the previous Liberal government.

Michele Boulva, director of the Catholic Organization for Life and Family, (COLF), said many politicians who supported same-sex marriage seem to have underestimated the level of opposition to the move, even among those with no strong religious views.

"It is an important issue for very many people," she said.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has said he'd reopen the debate, invigorating conservative religious groups who view the issue as both a key theological concern and a symbol of their apprehension about modern society.

"Our allies in this are fundamentalist Christians and Muslims," Weisgerber said. "We really need in Canada to support families."

Key to the church's political action will be educating its parishioners on Catholic traditions on such issues as homosexuality, gay marriage and abortion, Weisgerber said, and encouraging them to take their concerns to their MPs.

"Members need to understand what it means to be Catholic," he said.

COLF will play a big role in that, said group board member Bishop Ronald Fabbro of London, Ont., by providing bishops and parish priests with the educational materials they need, such as church bulletin inserts.

Weisgerber said the expectation that members of the church embrace its teachings on same-sex marriage will also apply to Catholic politicians, saying they must consider the values of their church when developing public policy.

"It would be difficult to be a member of the Liberal Party if you don't hold liberal views," he said.

The same-sex marriage debate has been especially divisive for the Liberals, with prominent Catholic members of the party being denied communion by their home parishes for supporting the right of gays to marry.

Weisgerber said the current Conservative minority government is more receptive to Catholic concerns on the issue, and predicts that faith groups will continue to raise the issue in the next election, whatever the outcome of the pending legislation.

That's because many religious groups, Catholics included, see gay marriage as a threat to the very foundation of society — the family.

"When you have an issue as important as the fate of the family, that can define an election," Weisgerber said.

Fabbro said the possibility of reopening a parliamentary debate on the issue will not be the end, adding the group is planning a seminar on the family next spring to keep the discussion alive.

First off, you stay the FUCK out of politics. You have no place in it. You don't pay taxes, you enjoy a number of freedoms simply for being some archaic institution, so unless you want to give that up, SHUT THE FUCK UP AND STAY IN YOUR CHURCH.

Secondly, you're threatening politicians with what.. excommunication if they don't fall into line and make policy based on what the catholic church thinks? This isn't a theocracy, and it's not up for debate. Religion does *not* form policy in this country, one stupid belief system does *not* apply to all citizens. SHUT THE FUCK UP AND STAY IN YOUR CHURCH.

Thirdly, gay marriage HAS NO FUCKING EFFECT ON ANYBODY ELSES MARRIAGE OR FAMILY. Europe has had it for years and lo and behold the sky hasn't fallen, nobody elses family has desintegrated because Adam and steve got hitched 2 doors down. SHUT THE FUCK UP AND STAY IN YOUR CHURCH.

The ignorance and bigotry on display by these fuckheads astounds me. I swear to god, I'll buy a goddamned shotgun and point it at their collective heads before I let them get near the political process in this country.

[cynic]

Just tell them that there is a whole country of young boys in South America and they'll leave you alone.......or pay them off, that always works.

[Sojiita]

"Our allies in this are fundamentalist Christians and Muslims," Weisgerber said.

^^He is insane!!!!

[Grimmlok]

Stupid dumbshits.. this is why religion should be banned or strictly controlled. IT ALWAYS gets out of hand because of a bunch of retards with their heads up their asses.

[cynic]

My own opinion is that too many religious folks stop believing IN their God and believe that they ARE God. How's that old Charlie Daniels' song go..."Sometimes I think that preacherman would like to do a little walking, too."

I'm not religious, but in my limited understanding, religion is used more as a club to beat people with than as a walking stick to get them through life.

[western]

Weisgerber said the current Conservative minority government is more receptive to Catholic concerns on the issue, and predicts that faith groups will continue to raise the issue in the next election, whatever the outcome of the pending legislation.

Gee, I wonder why they're suddenly more receptive to "Catholic concerns on the issue". It couldn't be to roust support to gain the majority...

That's because many religious groups, Catholics included, see gay marriage as a threat to the very foundation of society — the family.

Yeah, people lobbying to become a family are a real threat. Why don't they attack divorce, or would that alienate the majority of their flock?

It pisses me off that so many talking heads are hiding behind religion, twisting it to conform to their beliefs and then bringing it into politics. What makes me irate is having the politicians "representing" my area pushing their religious beliefs and basing their votes on their personal opinions rather than doing what they're supposed to do - represent their constituants and their COLLECTIVE beliefs. One that represents my area stated publicly that his constituants were against gay marriage - I don't recall being asked, nor do my neighbours.

This entire issue is a ridiculous witch hunt with no real purpose other than to legalize homophobia. Gay marriage was already passed into law and should be left alone. It's not as though we don't have life-threatening issues that could use political intervention - such as bringing home our peacekeepers or ensuring their safety.

[pacific breeze]

I think the fundie Christian and Muslim quote says it all, and with any luck, it will be enough to discredit them. Give these whack jobs enough rope, and they always hang themselves.

[ourmaninBusan]

[Grimmlok]

Yes, funny the first time..

[Sojiita]

[Grimmlok]

^^ i don't get it.....

[Sojiita]

Originally Posted by Grimmlok

^^ i don't get it.....

nazi pope+catholic church+undermining Canada = the post. Where is your sense of humor today?

[Grimmlok]

Erm.. well 'seig canada!' would mean "Hail Canada!", but the german usage of that is a negative connotation.. if anything canada ISN'T as fascist as the pope...

Thus the joke kinda crumbles, hence my not getting it

[Sojiita]

Originally Posted by Grimmlok

Erm.. well 'seig canada!' would mean "Hail Canada!", but the german usage of that is a negative connotation.. if anything canada ISN'T as fascist as the pope...

Thus the joke kinda crumbles, hence my not getting it

the whole point is that if the evil catholic church had it's way(as in slithering it's way into politics in Canada-see the thread title) then it would very much BE like a fascist state like Nazi Germany. oh nevermind!!!

between you and Lobelia I swear!...

[misswang]

Related article in the NYTimes yesterday...

Gay Marriage Galvanizes Canada’s Right
By CHRISTOPHER MASON
Published: November 19, 2006

OTTAWA — It was a lonely time here in the capital for the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada in the early days of the gay marriage debate in 2003.

Of the scattered conservative Christian groups opposed to extending marriage rights to same-sex couples, it was the only one with a full-time office in Ottawa to lobby politicians. “We were the only ones here,” said Janet Epp Buckingham, who was the group’s public policy director then.

But that was before the legislation passed in 2005 allowing gay marriage in Canada. And before the election early this year of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, a Conservative and an evangelical Christian who frequently caps his speeches with “God bless Canada.”

Today across the country, the gay marriage issue and Mr. Harper’s election have galvanized conservative Christian groups to enter politics like never before.

Before now, the Christian right was not a political force in this mostly secular, liberal country. But it is coalescing with new clout and credibility, similar to the evangelical Christian movement in the United States in the 1980s, though not nearly on the same scale.

Today, half a dozen organizations like the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada work full time in Ottawa, four of which opened offices in the past year, all seeking to reverse the law allowing gay marriage.

They represent just some of the dozens of well-organized conservative Christian groups around the country and more than a hundred grass-roots campaigns focused on the issue. In recent months, religious groups have held rallies, signed petitions, drafted resolutions and stepped up their efforts to lobby politicians to overturn the law.

These Christian conservatives have been instilled with a sense of urgency in the expectation that Mr. Harper will follow through on a campaign promise, as early as the first week of December, to hold a vote in Parliament on whether to revisit the gay marriage debate.

“With the legalization of gay marriage, faith has been violated and we’ve been forced to respond,” said Charles McVety, a leader of several evangelical Christian organizations that oppose gay marriage and president of the Canada Christian College in Toronto.

“Traditionally people of faith in Canada have not been politically active,” he said. “But now we’re finally seeing organizations that are professionalizing what was a very amateur political movement.”

Mr. McVety, who recites from memory the decision of an Ontario judge in 2003 that paved the way for gay marriages, has organized dozens of rallies attracting altogether some 200,000 supporters.

He asked the Rev. Jerry Falwell and other American evangelical leaders for advice on building a religious movement in Canada and traveled Ontario and Quebec in a red-and-white “Defend Marriage” bus.

Though the expected vote in Parliament will not decide whether to rescind the gay marriage legislation, but instead whether members wish to reopen the issue for debate, it remains significant for the Christian right and the government.

For leaders of the Christian right, the vote is a chance to get the marriage issue back on the government’s agenda and to get a better sense of where individual politicians, especially newly elected ones, stand. They have adopted that strategy in part because they say that the vote in Parliament will be difficult to win.

For Mr. Harper and his Conservative Party, the vote is an attempt to appease the religious social conservatives who form the core of the support for his minority government without losing moderate voters who want to avoid the issue.

If Mr. Harper appears to be too aggressive in pushing to revisit gay marriage he also risks losing votes in Quebec, where his pro-Israel stance and an environmental plan that does not meet Canada’s Kyoto Protocol commitments have already hurt his support in a province that is critical to his chances of securing a majority in the next election.

“Harper needs to show he is not the right-wing evangelical’s rump if he wants to grow into a majority government,” said Jonathan Malloy, a political science professor at Carleton University in Ottawa who studies the politics of evangelical Christians in Canada.

Mr. Harper’s government has not introduced an avalanche of socially conservative measures, but has instead shifted subtly to the right, one policy at a time.

In addition to derailing Liberal measures to loosen marijuana and prostitution laws, Mr. Harper has introduced tougher crime legislation, bolstered the military with new money and equipment, lowered the national sales tax and plans to raise the age of sexual consent to 16 from 14.

But the Christian right wants more and realizes a lot is at stake in the marriage question.

“Let’s say there’s a vote and the issue dissipates from the agenda in the same way abortion has faded away,” Mr. Malloy said. “Then they won’t have a clear-cut issue they can strongly organize on. They’re developing a base here but they need something to organize and keep the funds going.”

The Christian movement’s leaders are discussing how to sustain the momentum and growth spurred in the campaign against gay marriage. They agree that one issue is not enough to fuel a long-term movement. But they disagree on how to carry the momentum of the marriage campaign into other socially conservative issues like euthanasia and polygamy.

Fueling their hopes for sustaining the movement are polling figures from last winter’s election that show an identifiable bloc of religious voters, mainly evangelicals and Catholics, supporting the Conservative Party.

In a country where church attendance has dropped to about 20 percent of the population from about 60 percent since the 1940s, the Christian right hopes the polling numbers convince politicians there are still enough votes to be won by championing socially conservative issues.

But the experience of Canada’s abortion debate in the 1980s and early 90s looms ominously over optimism that the movement can be broadened beyond gay marriage.

At the time, evangelical leaders formed groups, raised money and drew significant support in an effort to establish stiff laws against abortion. In 1989, Prime Minister Brian Mulroney introduced legislation banning abortions in cases where the health of the mother was not at risk but the bill failed in the Senate and never became law.

Soon after, the evangelical political movement disbanded, remaining relatively dormant until the gay marriage issue arose.

“When the abortion legislation died everyone just went home and all the momentum was lost,” said Joseph C. Ben-Ami, executive director of the conservative Institute for Canadian Values, which opened an office in Ottawa last year to team up with Mr. McVety’s organizations in Toronto. “I do worry something like that could happen with what we’re seeing now.”

If that wasn't long enough...here's another article from The Nation

Letter From Canada: The New Christian Right
by Chris Hedges
posted November 9, 2006 (November 27, 2006 issue)


TORONTO - When things get bad in the United States it is reassuring to turn to Canada, a country with a high standard of living, a small military and a national healthcare plan. Canada always seemed to be, if a bit duller than America, also a bit saner.


But this is changing. The new Canadian prime minister, Stephen Harper, inspired by the neocons to the south, appears determined to visit the worst excesses of George Bush's presidency on his own country. He plans to pull Canada out of the Kyoto Protocol and expand military spending. He defended Israel's massive bombing of southern Lebanon, even as Israeli warplanes bombed a clearly marked UN observation post, killing a Canadian peacekeeper. He was the first world leader to cut off funding after Hamas took over the Palestinian Authority. The decision was made despite Hamas having taken power after winning democratic elections that not only were recognized as free and fair but fulfilled demands made by the West. Harper has extended the mission for the 2,200 Canadian soldiers fighting in Afghanistan, where forty-two have died so far. He has slashed $1 billion in funding that assists the most vulnerable Canadians, including cuts in adult literacy programs, legal aid to gays and lesbians, and measures to assist unemployed youth, despite a near-record surplus of $13.2 billion for 2005-06. If the Bush Administration launches an attack on Iran there is little doubt that Harper would line up behind Washington. When the Canadian prime minister was asked about Iran before his recent speech to the UN General Assembly, he called Iran "the biggest single threat the planet faces." And he sneers at Canada's long tradition of antimilitarism and generous social services, once calling Canada "a second-tier socialistic country, boasting ever more loudly about its...social services to mask its second-rate status."


But that is not the worst of it. The prime minister, who has begun, in very un-Canadian fashion, to close his speeches with the words "God Bless Canada," is also a born-again Christian. And Harper is rapidly building an alliance with the worst elements of the US Christian right.


Harper, who heads a minority government, is a member of the East Gate Alliance Church, part of the Christian and Missionary Alliance, a denomination with 400,000 members that believes in the literal word of the Bible, faith-healing and the imminent return of Jesus Christ. Women cannot be ordained in his church, homosexuality is a sin and abortion is murder. Canada, however, is unused to public displays of faith, and Harper has had to tread more lightly than George Bush. But many fear the prime minister is taking a cue from the Bush Administration and slowly mobilizing Canada's 3.5 million evangelicals--along with the 44 percent of Canadians who say they have committed themselves to Christ--as a power base. Harper has spent the past three years methodically knitting a coalition of social conservatives and evangelicals that looks ominously similar to the American model.


"While the Ottawa press corps has been preoccupied with Harper's ability to keep the most blooper-prone Christians in his caucus buttoned up, he has quietly but determinedly nurtured a coalition of evangelicals, Catholics, and conservative Jews that brought him to power and that will put every effort into ensuring that he stays there," wrote Marci McDonald in the October issue of the Canadian magazine Walrus.


Harper's Conservative government, for the first time since the January 2006 election that brought him to power, is tied in the polls with the Liberal Party, which is locked in a leadership battle that includes frontrunner Michael Ignatieff, a prolific author on ethnic conflict, a former Harvard professor and a vocal supporter of the Iraq War. A poll done for the Toronto Globe and Mail and CTV News has the Conservatives and Liberals tied with 32 percent support, although no date has been set for new elections.


Harper's combination of bellicosity, slash-and-burn attitude toward Canadian social programs and religious fervor makes many Canadians nervous. Unfortunately for Canada, Harper has a lot of American help. James Dobson has set up a Canadian branch of his Focus on the Family three blocks from the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa. The organization, called the Institute of Marriage and Family Canada, provides political expertise to and otherwise supports Harper's allies in the bid to turn Canada into an Americanized Christian state. Dobson, who rails against Canada's defense of gay rights and legalization of same-sex marriage, buys radio time in Canada to attack the nation's tolerance of gays and calls for legislation to roll back these measures. The proliferation of new Christian groups is dizzying, with organizations such as the National House of Prayer, the Institute for Canadian Values and the Canada Family Action Coalition, whose mission is "to see Judeo-Christian moral principles restored in Canada," publishing election guides, working with sympathetic legislators and mobilizing Canadian evangelicals in local and national campaigns. These groups turn frequently to American Christian leaders like Jerry Falwell, who came to Canada two years ago for an "Emergency Pastors Briefing" to rally 400 evangelical ministers against a bill before Parliament that included a provision making it a hate crime to denounce homosexuals. Other stalwarts, like former Christian Coalition leader Ralph Reed and televangelist John Hagee, have come north to spread their toxic message to the newly energized Canadian evangelical church. And in the Harper government they have found not only a willing convert but an important ally.


Harper's hold on power, like that of George Bush, is shaky. He too has no clear mandate to transform Canada, but this has not stopped his minority government from steadily undermining social programs and a once enlightened foreign policy that liberal Americans could only envy. The tools he is using are familiar to many Americans, who stood sleepily by as Pat Robertson and other religious bigots hijacked the Republican Party and moved into the legislative and executive branches of government. As I walk the windy streets of Toronto I wonder if those who push past me will wake up and see in Harper's government our own malaise or watch passively as Canada becomes a demented reflection of George Bush's America.